Shan Jiang, Ph.D., MLA, associate principal and director of research, GBBN Architects (Pittsburgh)
Armed with seven years of experience at West Virginia University, a top-tier research university, before transitioning to architecture, Shan Jiang combines academic rigor with the business and operational realities of architectural practices.
Today, she serves as director of research and associate principal at GBBN Architects (Pittsburgh), where she leads high-impact post-occupancy evaluations (POEs) that directly inform patient care models and design standards.
Her work over the past year highlights her commitment to solving complex healthcare challenges. At Cincinnati Children’s William K. Schubert, MD, Mental Health Center in Cincinnati, she leads a multistakeholder behavioral health research initiative, convening partners across clinical, academic, and industry sectors. This effort moves beyond evaluation toward implementation of a scalable toolkit to improve therapeutic milieus, furniture strategies, and staff-patient interactions.
Furthermore, she’s serving as co-principal investigator on a critical care research grant, synthesizing lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic into resilient design strategies that strengthen surge capacity and staff performance in intensive care units.
Within the firm, she’s developed a scalable POE framework, enabling systematic learning across projects. By standardizing tools such as digital behavior mapping, heatmapping workflows, structured interviews, and space syntax integration, her process allows findings to be compared and synthesized firmwide.
Going beyond research, she’s also focused on how healthcare design teams practice. She institutionalized “research sprints,” rapid, focused investigations into patient demographics, community health indicators, behavioral patterns, and environmental needs. The strategy has been applied to major healthcare initiatives, equipping project teams with actionable insights at the earliest stages while shifting research from retrospective validation to proactive design intelligence.
In early 2025, she was appointed co-editor of the Health Environments Research & Design Journal (HERD), bringing her expertise in therapeutic landscapes and healthcare environments to the journal’s editorial leadership.
By translating complex evidence into actionable design intelligence, Jiang is fundamentally transforming how healthcare design teams think, decide, and learn.
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